The last time I posted one of these I was definitely moving up in the world, in terms of latitude at least. This time around it’s more of a sideways shift geographically speaking, with maybe a degree’s difference (if that). I’ve left my position as a Computational Physics Programmer with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (neé Atomic Energy of Canada Limited) and accepted a position as a Data Analytics Engineer with Contata Solutions in Minneapolis.

CNL has a fantastically talented workforce and I enjoyed my time in Computational Reactor Physics, but ultimately I don’t think they really needed me. My first six-month plan on starting was to plan the development of a suite of post-processing tools for reactor physics simulators, with a goal of an initial prototype of the tools six months after that. Three months in to this 12 month plan I was shipping the first version to reactor analysts. That done, I had the opportunity to work on everything from RSS scrapers to exploratory data analysis to implementing more matrix solvers than I care to remember. As interesting as the work could be, I didn’t find the learning experience I’d been looking for and so it was time for me to move on.

Contata is working on some pretty interesting projects involving big data analytics and machine learning, to wit: Alertmix. Very much looking forward to learning a lot!